Three weeks from today, Americans
finally will have a chance to vote for president of the United States --
hundreds of other offices on ballots across the country. As a presidential
historian who has written histories of presidential campaigning, of various
presidents, of First Ladies, including Hillary Clinton when she was in that
symbolic role, and, most recently, of the Clintons and the 1990s in The Age of Clinton:
America in the 1990s, every day until
Election Day I will post an article putting this election in historical
context, trying to explain this wild and wacky race using history as our guide.
So here it goes, with hashtag #2016incontext

At the risk of being outrageously unacademic, my gut tells
me that this campaign has been affected far less by political commercials than
previous campaigns. We will have to
await the vote and future research to see if I am right or wrong. But the
Donald Trump campaign has been a personality-driven phenomenon choreographed by
a celebrity who understands that the best publicity is free publicity. At the
same time, his opponent Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye for decades
as well.

The campaign has been defined by Trump’s speeches – and
outrageous statements; by media driven controversies over said statements, her
emails, his taxes, her husband’s foundation; by leaks – of Trump’s 2005 Access
Hollywood appearance and of Clintonites’ emails; and by the debates.

Speaking anecdotally, not one person I know has initiated a
conversation about this campaign with me based on any of the ads - -it seems
that Saturday Night Live parodies have launched far more interactions than paid
political ads.

Still, political ads help tell a campaign’s story - -and
show what a campaign thinks will work.

b. b) Donald Trump is running both against Hillary
Clinton and against the status
quo. Most intriguing to me was this ad, movement,
which, echoing Ronald Reagan’s famous Morning
in America ad, suggests a more positive campaign strategy that might have
worked, but was barely tried.